Alejandro
Jodorowsky was active as a film director in the 60s and 70s, following a
career as an actor and director of experimental theatre and happenings.

Jodorowsky’s 1970 film El Topo (picture right) was a surreal blend of
the Wild West and eastern philosophy. Sort of Luis Bunuel meets Sergio
Leone with a touch of Kenneth Anger and performance art thrown in:
nudity, amputees, dead animals, lots of blood, spiritual philosophy and
psychedelia. It was packaged and promoted as “midnight movie cult
cinema” in the Elgin Cinema, New York, relying on word-of-mouth
recommendation among Chelsea hipsters. And so, they say, it helped
establish an “outsider” genre of films based on a culture of late-night
screenings, reviving interest in neglected filmmakers like Tod Browning
and Ed Wood, and providing an audience for new film makers like David
Lynch and John Waters. Critic Ben Cobb writes that after enthusiastic
recommendation by John Lennon , “El Topo screenings took the form of
a drug-fuelled happening. People went to be mentally altered by the
film, spiritually enriched or, at the very least, have an experience.”

John Lennon’s manager Allen
Klein saw potential in Jodorowksy’s brand of druggy-exploitation cinema,
bought the rights to El Topo and put the money up for his next film The
Holy Mountain (picture below). Klein screened El Topo in a Broadway
cinema, which immediately blew its credibility as far as its cultish
audience was concerned. Having learned a marketing lesson, screenings of
The Holy Mountain were limited to midnight slots on Fridays and
Saturdays where they attracted a sizeable cult following for a
remarkable 16 months.

Jodorowsky and Klein fell out over a new exploitation film project they
were discussing. According to Jodorowsky “I weighed up my artistic
integrity against fame and wealth. After a torturous half-hour, I
reached my decision.” Allan Klein was furious and did his best to
make sure that El Topo and The Holy Mountain were never screened, while
Jodorowsky did his best to encourage the spread of bootlegs of the two
films. There were legal battles until 2004 when some sort of
reconciliation was reached and the films are now widely available on
DVD.

Jodorowsky went on to make the exploitation
film “Santa Sangre”, but seems to have been mostly occupied with a
writing career, books on psychology and the tarot as well as the sort of
adult graphic novels that are popular in France.

Jodorosky’s
films El Topo and The Holy Mountain contain some of the most striking
and strange sequences in modern cinema. They are masterpieces of
grandiose self-indulgence, and have been a big influence on the likes of
Matthew Barney. Their bizarre scenes and ritualized narrative structures
are the sort of thing you grow accustomed to if you’re familiar with
avant-garde and outsider art, but never with this kind of budget.

What is puzzling, then, is how
these films ever got made. The extras on Jodorowsky's DVD collections
show him at work doing tarot readings and conducting seminars on “Psychomagic:
The Transformative Power of Shamanic Psychotherapy” (the title of
his latest book). What becomes clear is that the guy is very persuasive
and has great manipulative skills. The people with the money must have
been suckers for that kind of scam back in the day...

Alejandro Jodorowsky's
'Dune: An Exhibition of a Film of a Book That Never Was was at
Plymouth Arts Centre 2 April – 16 May 2010. Curated by Tom Morton. See
review by Nigel Ayers.